The Supreme Court may have struck down the District's 32-year-old ban on handguns !

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WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court may have struck down the District's 32-year-old ban on handguns, but that doesn't mean you can go out and buy one today. D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles says D.C. will start issuing permits to own a gun in 21 days, once the Supreme Court hands their decision down to the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. "This is not open season with handguns," Nickles says. "We are going to strictly regulate the registration of handguns. There will be no authorization of automatic or semi-automatics." The city may also require that trigger locks be kept on...snip

D.C. Council Chairman Vince Gray says he still hopes to craft laws that will keep D.C.'s laws the most restrictive in the country.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier says her biggest concerns are accidents in the home and the safety of her officers who enter homes on a daily basis.

For the next 21 days, D.C. Police officers will use discretion if they arrest anyone with an illegal gun in the home. If a person is found with a gun but is not committing any other crimes, the person will not be charged.

D.C. Police say they will grant amnesty to people who currently have guns, and allow them to register their guns.

Republicans believe Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling striking down Washington D.C.’s handgun ban has revived gun rights as a campaign issue, benefiting the GOP up and down the November ticket. “The gun issue is not going away,” said Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican presidential candidate. “We are going to drive it. We are going to keep talking about this issue.”

Republicans will be aided by the National Rifle Association, which promises to do “everything” it can to hit Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (Ill.) on the issue.

A year ago, Obama’s campaign said he supported D.C.’s gun ban, but Obama offered support for the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday.

NRA executive director Chris Cox said the group “fully intends to tell this story all over America” via billboards, radio buys, television buys, grassroots organizing and by creating a heavy internet presence.

"These suckers are still at it even when SCOTUS reads the Constitution correctly they still nit pick !"

No, we don't suppose that's going to happen any time soon. But it should.

The 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is evidence that, while the founding fathers were brilliant men, they could have used an editor.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

If the founders had limited themselves to the final 14 words, the amendment would have been an unambiguous declaration of the right to possess firearms. But they didn't, and it isn't. The amendment was intended to protect the authority of the states to organize militias. The inartful wording has left the amendment open to public debate for more than 200 years. But in its last major decision on gun rights, in 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found that that was the correct interpretation.

On Tuesday, five members of the court edited the 2nd Amendment. In essence, they said: Scratch the preamble, only 14 words count.

In doing so, they have curtailed the power of the legislatures and the city councils to protect their citizens.

The majority opinion in the 5-4 decision to overturn a Washington, D.C., ban on handgun possession goes to great lengths to parse the words of the 2nd Amendment. The opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, spends 111/2 pages just on the meaning of the words "keep and bear arms."

But as Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a compelling dissent, the five justices in the majority found no new evidence that the 2nd Amendment was intended to limit the power of government to regulate the use of firearms. They found no new evidence to overturn decades of court precedent.

They have claimed, Stevens wrote, "a far more active judicial role in making vitally important national policy decisions than was envisioned at any time in the 18th, 19th, or 20th Centuries."

•••

It's a relief that the majority didn't go further in its policymaking on gun control.

The majority opinion states that the D.C. handgun ban and a requirement for trigger locks violate the 2nd Amendment. By virtue of this decision, Chicago's 1982 ban on handguns is not likely to survive a court challenge. A lawsuit seeking to overturn the Chicago ordinance was filed on Thursday by the Illinois State Rifle Association...........................................ABOUT BLOODY TIME !